What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities
CVE-2021-1440: Cisco IOS XR Software BGP Resource Public Key Infrastructure Denial of Service Vulnerability
- Severity: medium (CVSS 6.8 v3.1)
- Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
- EPSS: 0.8% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
- Public exploit or detection template: none known
- Published: 2024-11-18 · updated 2026-06-17
- Weakness: CWE-617
Description
A vulnerability in the implementation of the Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) feature of Cisco IOS XR Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) process to crash, resulting in a denial of service (DoS) condition. This vulnerability is due to the incorrect handling of a specific RPKI to Router (RTR) Protocol packet header. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by compromising the RPKI validator server and sending a specifically crafted RTR packet to an affected device. Alternatively, the attacker could use man-in-the-middle techniques to impersonate the RPKI validator server and send a specifically crafted RTR response packet over the established RTR TCP connection to the affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause a DoS condition because the BGP process could constantly restart and BGP routing could become unstable.Cisco has released software updates that address this vulnerability. There are no workarounds that address this vulnerability.This advisory is part of the September 2021 release of the Cisco IOS XR Software Security Advisory Bundled Publication. For a complete list of the advisories and links to them, see .
Affected products
- Cisco IOS XR Software: from 4.3.0 before 7.3.1 — fixed in 7.3.1
How to fix
Upgrade to a fixed version: Cisco IOS XR Software 7.3.1. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.
References
- https://sec.cloudapps.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco-sa-asaftd-xss-webui-gQLSFyPM
- https://sec.cloudapps.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco-sa-esa-sma-info-disclo-VOu2GHbZ
- https://sec.cloudapps.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco-sa-sdwan-sigverbypass-gPYXd6Mk
- https://sec.cloudapps.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco-sa-xrbgp-rpki-dos-gvmjqxbk
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